stemsynthillusionist:

prokopetz:

Upon consideration, I think the reason that most attempts to update Paranoia as a game for the present day rather than 1970s period piece fall flat for me is because the various rewrites have largely been unwilling to seriously re-examine the game’s central antagonists: the Computer and the High Programmers.

The Computer’s probably the more obvious of the two. For the most part it’s still the same crazy AI as always, and that’s precisely the problem: crazy AIs have spent decades having their image rehabilitated in popular media, to the point that even at their worst they tend to come off as nonthreatening, even friendly. It’s true that there was a time when a computer displaying human foibles was inherently disconcerting, but if anything the exact opposite is true today – straight up, framing the Computer as genuine existential threat is a hard sell when 50% of your target audience has written fanfic about how much they want to have sex with GLaDOS

As for the High Programmers, the problem is twofold. Then and now, their image is one part Sinister Technocrat and one part James Bond Villain, and each of those components has credibility problems, albeit for different reasons. Sinister technocrat baddies can work in principle, but the depicting computer programmers in particular as sinister technocrats is difficult to pull off because it’s no longer a particularly esoteric skill set. Many of your players probably program computers themselves. Add to that thirty years of misguided pop-culture hagiography of programmer icons like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and the rehabilitation of the mad scientist archetype as a counterculture hero (thank you, Tesla stans!), and making your baddies wacky programmers makes them less threatening, not more. As for the Bond Villain component, it’s simply behind the times. Wizened patriarchs scheming in darkened chambers don’t keep us up at night these days; the modern boogeyman is less Ernst Blofeld than he is Martin Shkreli.

The tricky part is that I’m not sure you can give either of those elements a serious overhaul without turning Paranoia into a totally different game. I guess that’s what’s nagging at me: is the premise of Paranoia inextricably bound to its era, or is there a way to update it that simply hasn’t occurred to anyone yet?

Honestly, I find that people are still pretty afraid of computers and programmers, they’re just afraid of them doing different things.

I think overreliance on predictive algorithms could be a way to go. A computer that insists on punishing people for crimes they haven’t committed, but that the computer calculated they will commit at some point. With the computer keeping its algorithms that it uses to “predict” this secret, the computer’s accuracy never independently verified because all suspects are dead before they do anything, and the strong implication that whatever data the computer initially used to set up their algorithm also copied the human prejudices common at the time of the computer’s creation, as predictive algorithms that exist now tend to do.

You could work with a hyper-surveillant Friend Computer that’s bad at interpreting data: e.g., reads a playful tweet saying something is “the bomb” as equally threatening to a literal bomb threat. Overgeneralized algorithms to list someone as “dangerous” or “bad” that are next to impossible to get re-evaluated by a human (and the computer refuses to re-evaluate any decision it makes, because it is Always Right), and otherwise being punished without trial because it kind of sort of looks like you did something illegal from that blurry security camera at an awkward angle. You know those bots that banned you from chat rooms as a kid because it assumed your out-of-context post was encouraging drugs or being sexual or what not? That’s Friend Computer, except now it’s in charge of the entire justice system.

You could play with computers making the sort of mistakes that computer’s tend to make but humans rarely do: look at any neural network that likes to identify pictures/words/etc., assume Friend Bot has similar mistakes to the “empty green fields have sheep” phenomenon. Problem solving that doesn’t take anything into account accept then The Problem Is Solved Effeciently; having significantly less humans will solve starvation, probably, and eliminating a large area with humans might be the easiest way to kill exactly one “”dangerous”” human. Friend Computer needing a lot of time and CPU for problems that are more intuitive to human brains, leading rebels to communicate with Pictionary and similar games to avoid the computer’s gaze.

You’re definitely right that AIs have become more sympathetic and cute in contemporary media, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a *bad* thing in regards to Friend Computer’s character. Paranoia is in many ways comedic, and “cute, presumably lovable thing continues to violently murder you” fits in with the dark humor tone relatively well; the computer’s theoretical cuteness compliments the already present joke of the loving Friend Computer who Definitely loves you and has your best interest at heart, what are talking about. Having the computer be fairly competent (as in, actually succeeds in killing people and keeping the live ones on their constant best behavior the majority of the time), adding in elements from contemporary military and surveillance software that people rarely find endearing, and focusing more on computer specific traits then human-like ones like emotions, should take the edge off the part of the computer sympathy that is interfering.

The programmers are a little bit harder, but I think it’s doable if it’s not so much the most technically skilled members that become programmers, but the wealthiest who have any access to the computers at all. Wealth and lineage is needed for the computer to accept any edits, those who have access bias the computer to prioritize their own safety and make it harder for anyone else to get in, wealthy assholes intentionally make learning programming next to impossible for those who aren’t made of money. Being a programmer might require passing an Ethics Test, which is about as reliable and objective as our current IQ tests (as in, neither of those things, IQ tests were initially made with explicitly racist intentions and continue to be culturally biased and functionally meaningless). More greed and spite motivated than mad science-y, albeit cartoonishly so. Personally I think dramatic “and THIS is how I got away with my EVILNESS” is necessary for the tone of paranoia, but honestly I think that could be more compelling with a chasmatic, often-praised CEO type whose excited as hell to finally admit his acts when he’s in private, or whose powerful enough he can do terrible things completely in public without people trying to stop him (e.g., how people currently respond to Bezos and half of Hollywood).

Would that be the same game? I don’t know. But I’d probably enjoy playing it.

This is interesting and probably a more fitting Computer for the tone.